Category: Networking

We recently had the need to make sure our front end apache httpd reverse proxy and ssl termination server could handle the larger number of websocket connections we are going to use with it. Given websockets are longer lived connections, this is a different use of apache httpd and we want to get it right. The proxied service is capable of handling tens of thousands of concurrent connections, if not hundreds of thousands or more.

First, our testing tool is custom made, it makes all the websocket connections first and then proceeds to ping. This is important as it exercises the concurrent connections capabilities of httpd. When using it, the client system needs the ability to create enough sockets. The first limit I encountered was with my test client system. The shell environment defaults to 1024 open files limited. It is a soft limit, so use ulimit -S to adjust the limit. Even ab will show an error of “socket: Too many open files (24)” if you use -n 1050 and -c 1050 options.

Now, your testing tool can create more than 1024 connections. The next limit I ran into was that of connections on the httpd server. Even mpm_event uses thread per request (do not let the event name fool you). The default ubuntu apache2 mpm_event configuration allows for 150 concurrent connections:

Now turn up the slowhttptest numbers. Change the -c parameter to 15000 and the -r to 1500. It should take 10sec to ramp up the connections. In my use case I could not create that many connections so quickly. slowhttptest was maxing out a CPU core.

All of the above apache httpd config was done using the mpm_event processing module. The next issue I ran into was a case of mpm_worker not behaving as I expected. I have a doubly proxied system, because this is super real world where we route http things all over the place, sometimes in ways we shouldn’t but because we are lazy, or it is easier or… anyway…

In ubuntu/trusty with apache httpd 2.4.7 mpm_worker has a limit of 64 ThreadsPerChild even if you configure it with a larger number. There is no warning. You’d never know unless you take a look at the number of processes in a worker: $ ps -uwww-data -opid,ppid,nlwp The fix is to switch from mpm_worker to mpm_event.

Wayne has a great post on the new juju lxd work. I’ve been using it a bit and it is awesome. It is super fast and I can create and destroy environments faster than creating and destroying with juju-local.

One thing which I’ve done which has made all LXC and LXD instances more valuable to me, in my home development environment, is to use a bridge to put them directly on my home LAN.

Normally, LXC creates its own device, lxc-br0, which is managed by the lxc-net service. The service creates the device, brings it up, manages the dnsmasq tied to it (which provides DHCP for the 10.0.3.0/24 range).

Bridge your interface

Instead of using lxc-br0, I create a br0. I add my eth0 (and in my case other devices) to that br0. Then I configure LXC and LXD to use br0 instead of lxc-br0. I go as far as stopping the lxc-net service, since I’m not using it.

There is one trick if you are going to do that on a remote home system, e.g. I have an old laptop I leave in the basement and I’m really lazy and I don’t want to walk down there and use its console when I screw up its networking. The trick is to make sure eth0 comes up on br0 when its added there.

Before you do anything, make sure bridge-utils is installed. It probably is if you are already using lxc, but if this is a fresh install, you’ll want to apt-get install bridge-utils

Edit your /etc/network/interfaces and disable eth0 by setting it to manual. Add it to br0 by adding a new br0 section and listing eth0 in bridge-ifaces and bridge-ports.

Now run sudo ifup br0. At this point something magical happens, the DHCP lease is renewed but this time the IP address is bound to br0. The magical part is that br0 used the eth0 MAC to make the DHCP request and so you get the same IP address in response and even your SSH session stays open. YAY!

LXC can use any bridge

TADA, now any LXC containers you start with lxc-start will use br0 and get an address from your household DHCP server. They will be accessible from any host in your home.

Now what about LXD?

LXD can use any bridge

It turns out, while LXD is a layer on top of LXC, it doesn’t use /etc/lxc/default.conf for its default config, but instead uses its own settings. These are editable with lxc profile edit default. Change the lxcbr0 in your editor and save and exit. You can check that it is correct by using lxc profile show default.

I launched a Windows Server 2012 R2 instance in EC2 recently and while the AWS console does let you retrieve an Administrator password, it requires you to paste your PRIVATE key to AWS console to do it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I learned how to use boto to get the encrypted password data and openssl cmdline to decrypt it to get the password.

Its a 2 step process with maybe the zeroth step being writing a .boto file with your aws credentials if you have never used boto.

I’m assuming its the only instance running. If you have lots of others, use a list comprehension with if clause to filter to one on the get_all_instances() call, or just skip that call and paste an id string you see in AWS console for inst.id in the get_password_data call.

openssl rsautil -in ec2-admin-password -inkey .ssh/id_rsa -decrypt

You’ll be prompted for your private key password (and you MUST have a password. ssh-agent is easy) and then the Administrator password will be output to stdout.

It is a simple iptables ruleset which blocks most of the common rfc1918 addresses. You have probably heard of these, the 10/8, 192.168/16 and 172.16/12 address ranges. What might be new to you, is that there is a whole great many more ranges which one should never observe on the internet.

You might add to your list:

TEST-NET(192.0.2.0/24) from rfc3330

benchmarktest(198.18.0/25) from rfc2544

protocol assignment(192.0.0.0/24)

testnet2(198.51.100/24) and testnet3(203.0.113/24) from rfc5736 and 5737

carrier grade nat(100.64/10) from rfc6598

Blocking addresses of these ranges is completely valid. IANA has not and will not assign them for use on the internet. They are reserved and non internet route-able.

I’m an openwrt novice, but I know enough about linux and iptables to usually get done what I want. When Comcast announced they were trialing IPv6, I jumped at the opportunity to migration from my trusty Hurricane Electric tunnel to something more direct.

I’m running Kamikaze 8.09.1 brcm-2.4 on my Linksys WRT54GL these instructions probably won’t work elsewhere. I’m guessing that IPv6 is a little different in a 2.6 kernel with a new iptables. If you have very new stuff you should be using 6rd instead of 6to4.

I’m writing this because much of the information I found out there for 6to4 on Linux didn’t work for me, or was only partly correct and I had to piece together suggestions from different sources.

make a script in /etc/rc.d with this content. I called mine comcast6to4

I wrote this because Wifi in my home is very slow. Its so slow I’m tempted to run a network cable to my couch so that even when I’m couch surfing I can have fast access to my server.

In an effort to diagnose my slow Wifi, I tried to see if my neighbors were causing interference by running Wifi on the same or overlapping channel as me. I downloaded netstumbler; it didn’t work. I downloaded some other tool; neither did it.

So I wondered how hard it would be to write my own. It turns out Windows 7 added to the Wlan* api to expose all of the necessary data. After some digging I found the managedwlan project on codeplex. Now I got to play.

Once I figured out the api, I was able to write the entire application with pretty much one LINQ expression:

Configure a new VMware virtual machine with an appropriately sized disk, a network adapter (I prefer bridged) and a CD ROM Drive pointed to said restorecd.iso from step 1. Do not start the VM at the last step.

Find the vmx file created in step 2. Add a line ethernet0.virtualDev= “e1000”. This the required trick step since Windows Home Server doesn’t have a driver for the LANCE network chip which vmware normally emulates.